Category: News

On Saturday April 9th, Play-Well partnered with Fidi Families for their Out to See event at the South Street Seaport. We had a wonderful time and Insomnia Cookies were even there! Yum! Check out this fantastic video about our magical day at the seaport!

On March 26th, 2016, Play-Well TEKnologies partnered with The Atlanta Science Festival to build a replica of Atlanta out of LEGO. Over 100,000 pieces of LEGO were used to build the city, which included a working Ferris Wheel and replicas of the Coca Cola and CNN building. Here is a timelapse video of the build.

WHAT: Breaking The Record for The World’s Longest LEGO Bridge

On March 19th, 2016, families from all over the Tempe, Mesa, and Gilbert will descend upon the Tempe Public Library to help build a 200 Ft. long LEGO, corbelled arch bridge in order to break the record for the World’s Longest LEGO Bridge!

Inspired by the cool design of the Mill Avenue Bridge in Tempe, Play-Well TEKnologies and the City of Tempe came up with this idea to introduce kids to this architectural feat while attempting to build a colossal structure that some would say is impossible! Families have an opportunity to be a part of history and get to play with LEGO at the same time.

This is a free event open to the general public.

The press contact for this event is Jennifer Gaona. She can be reached at 602.317.7448 or at jennifer@play-well.org.

The Mill Avenue Bridge

Turning the Mill Bridge LEGO!

Play-Well hosted an event last Fall where they broke the World Record for the Longest LEGO Chain! Here’s a video of the event below. Hopefully, a new world record will be set on Saturday, March 19th 2016!

Play-Well also partnered with the Stanford University Brain Development Project Lab in December 2015 to break another World Record, building over 80 Spinal Columns out of LEGO.

About Play-Well TEKnologies
For the past 19 years, Play-Well TEKnologies has taught approximately 1,000,000 kids about the engineering world with LEGO. They currently teach over 100,000 students/year across the country with the goal of inspiring them to pursue careers in STEM fields. For more information about Play-Well, visit play-well.org.

On Sunday January 9th Play-Well TEKnologies partnered up with Peabody Charter School in Santa Barbara to help raise money for their PTO, which provides wonderful activities for the school’s population. The goal for the event was to build the tallest LEGO skyscraper possible in 2 hours. With 30 students and their parents in attendance to help we were able to build a skyscraper that was about 11ft tall and used a variety of different sized LEGO bricks to achieve.

Look at that sky scraper!

After the skyscraper was completed students were allowed to add additional structures and their own personal creative touches to area surrounding the skyscraper. Some of these structures included a park, a rocket ship, houses, a Minecraft portal and much more. Peabody is one of our many location we hold our after school enrichment programs at currently in Santa Barbara California.

On Saturday December 12th Play-Well partnered with a new movement center in Stapleton, Your Soul’s Movement Center, for a LEGO Airplanes workshop. Channeling the Wright Brothers students built airplanes, runways, and control towers. Students experienced using motorized lego with motors and battery packs and had the opportunity to make their Airplanes unique, we had some crazy flying machines! Led by Lego Engineers Paul, Jake, and Peter students were divided into age groups and taught the basic components of the airplane as well as what lift, thrust and drag mean.

It was a snowy day in Denver but there was lots of fun to be had inside the movement center. We can’t wait to do another workshop with this location again soon!

We are excited to announce that Play Well is expanding to Hawaii! It’s Island time! Our amazing Play-Wellian, Wrenn is adding Hawaii to our list of Play Well states!

We’re kicking off Play-Well Hawaii with a few winter camps in Honolulu!

Kama’aina Kids is our new partner in Hawaii!

We are working with Kama’aina Kids to create a unique camp experience at the Bishop Museum from December 21st-23rd. Bishop Museum campers will have a 90-minute Play Well engineering class with over 20,000 LEGO pieces.

Back in 2009, a corporation asked us if we could provide them a fun team building event using LEGO® materials. Well, our organization had been playing with LEGO® bricks since 1997, so we thought, why not give it a try. Approximately 8 years later, we have now run team building events for Fortune 500 companies, around the country, such as Google, Microsoft, VISA, Pixar, and Clorox. Check out some of what we have done below:

We recently ran a Play-Well Team Building Event for Google’s Global Food Program Team. The goals were to inspire creativity, collaboration, all while solving problems in a fun way. And of course, we used LEGO to do this. Check out some of the LEGO challenges they got to do.

The team dove fully into the project, sometimes even standing on tables in order to accomplish their goal.

We hope that will stay up there.

Staff took a lot of joy in trying to knock each other’s LEGO Towers down.

This LEGO tower was left standing though.

Now on to the more complex LEGO build.

One of the challenges is to figure out how to get many different contraptions to work all at a uniform rate.

Attendees used everything at their disposal to help solve a complex LEGO build.

Even choosing to build on the floor if necessary.

One of the managers overseeing his staff’s work. He was quite impressed.

Now they have figured out what they need to do and are building fast.

We even had time for LEGO car races.

And the competition was fierce.

Some staff even left the build to watch the LEGO races.

Back in the room, the large build is moving quickly.

Once that task was done, it was time for the creative LEGO builds.

Many different ideas were coming into play.

This build included a pirate theme and a flag.

This group incorporated flowers, twigs, and a wine cork into their LEGO contraption.

This team was quite proud of their LEGO creation.

Overall, people were having a great time.

In the end, we had a debrief about the build and the day.

Many people had built some impressive LEGO creations in such a short span of time.

We reviewed some of the lessons we learned that day about the team. Overall, a really great group that worked extremely well together.

On Saturday, November 7th at the Bay Area Science Festival, we helped families build the largest SF Giants LEGO Logo Ever Built at AT&T Park…that we are aware of. The SF Giants LEGO Logo was 7.5 Ft tall and made up of over 11,000 LEGO Bricks. It took approximately 6.5 hours to build and over 400 families participated in the build. Check out some of the pictures and video of the build below.

You can see the beginning of the sign in the bottom right hand corner. We started at 9:30 AM.

People were quite excited to visit our booth, as they got to play with LEGO motorized projects, as well as build the SF Giants LEGO Sign.

We have started to make progress, but we got a long way to go.

Even the President of Play-Well came out to help, as we knew over 18,000 people would show up for the Bay Area Science Festival. Great turnout!

Some of the San Francisco Giants employees even came out to build. We asked each of them if they had ever seen a SF Giants LEGO sign that big before, and they all said they had not.

Even The Special from the LEGO movie was welcome families to our booth. Play-Well, Everything is Awesome, and Love are the messages on this conveyor belt.

Steady progress is being made. Time to start stepping on stools.

A lot more progress has been made, especially around the bottom. This kids can build fast.

We are making sure to get every nook and cranny. No space will be missed.

This father put both of his sons on his shoulders in order to finish the middle of the sign.

When you can’t reach, time to get on the shoulders. This became more of a common practice after awhile.

A larger and larger crowd build around the Giants LEGO logo throughout the day.

Many a Giants fan came out to help out.

We are close to finishing the S and F in the LEGO sign.

Even the little ones helped out way up top.

Not sure what we love more. The child at the very top or that awesome SF Giants jacket.

We were very excited that we could be part of one of the first ever STEAM Carnivals.

We had Play-Well staff help out with the last part of the sign, as it was too tall at that point for many kids to reach.

SONY DSC

Crowds came for the sign, but stayed to play with many of our LEGO Engineering Motorized projects.

Even a 2 year old can make a different in helping us to finish this SF Giants LEGO Logo.

Even some Junior Giants came out to help us build this SF Giants LEGO Logo.

So close to being finished.

Final touches.

It’s finally complete. Over 11,000 LEGO Bricks and build in just over 6.5 hours.

We think it came out great.

Over 400 families helped us add a few pieces each to this SF Giants LEGO logo.

We could not have accomplished this or even had the opportunity to make this without the support of the Bay Area Science Festival. Thanks for having us and being open to the idea.

We hope every family appreciated being a part of this huge LEGO build. We hope to do it again soon.

Here is the Play-Well crew that helped make this a reality. Great job!

The SF Giants LEGO Logo is currently being displayed at our engineering educational center, Play-Well Marin.